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By Gabrielle Inhofe

Gone With The Wind’s scriptwriter Sidney Howard had the difficult task of converting the 1,000-page novel into a film script that was not too long, without sacrificing key elements of the novel. One of producer David O. Selznick’s concerns was that all problems be caught before filming started, because cutting scenes out would be more expensive than having an appropriately long script written in the first place. To help Howard, Selznick and his story editor Val Lewton employed the skills of other scriptwriters and authors.

In October 1938, Selznick sent the script to two top MGM scriptwriters, Lawrence Stallings and Bradbury Foote, for help editing. The men, under confidentiality, had eight days to make their suggestions.

Foote’s editing gave the film a happy ending, destroying one of the novel’s most emotionally powerful scenes. In Foote’s rewrite, Rhett does indeed leave, but Mammy thrashes the famous “Tomorrow is another day!” speech, telling Scarlett, “Never you mind tomorrow, honey. This here is today! There goes your man!” The scene dissolves to a shot of a railroad station. Scarlett corners Rhett in the car of a train, entreating, “Oh, Rhett! Life is just beginning for us! Can’t you see it is? We’ve both been blind, stupid fools! But we’re still young! We can make up for those wasted years! Oh, Rhett—let me make them up to you! Please! Please!” He kisses her hands, and the scene fades out. Selznick considered this rewrite “awful.”

Selznick employed a host of other writers to help find creative ways of combining scenes from the novel, and almost all of the writers who worked on the script did so after filming had commenced. Writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ben Hecht, John Van Druten, John Balderston, Ronald Brown, and Edwin Justus Mayer briefly worked on the script. In a memo from Fitzgerald to Selznick, Fitzgerald proposes that Scarlett’s miscarriage be cut. The death of Bonnie, Scarlett’s miscarriage, and Melanie’s death in childbirth, all in rapid succession, would be too much for the audience to endure. Fitzgerald mentions that the miscarriage seems less sorrowful in the book because Scarlett already had three children. He writes, “There is something about three gloomy things that is infinitely worse than two, and I do not believe that people are grateful for being harrowed in this way.”

Pages from various drafts of the screenplay are on view through January 4 in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition The Making of Gone With The Wind. A fully illustrated exhibition catalog of the same title is available. Co-published by the Harry Ransom Center and University of Texas Press, the catalog includes a foreword written by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) host and film historian Robert Osborne.

Schrader had previously donated Robert De Niro’s costume from Taxi Driver after De Niro donated his archive to the Ransom Center in 2006. The costume is now on display in the Ransom Center’s exhibition Making Movies, which runs through Aug. 1.

The Schrader collection consists of more than 300 boxes and includes outlines and drafts of scripts and screenplays, correspondence, production materials, videos, audio tapes, press clippings, photographs, and juvenilia.

The collection will be made accessible once it is processed and cataloged. A small case of materials from the collection will be on display in the Ransom Center lobby through March 21.

By Alison Macor

What do Batman, Top Gun, and Beverly Hills Cop II have in common?All were rewritten by versatile screenwriter and “script doctor” Warren Skaaren. As a fellow at the Ransom Center last summer, Alison Macor, independent scholar and former film critic for The Austin Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman, immersed herself in the Ransom Center’s Warren Skaaren collection. Macor shares her experiences working in the collection in preparation for her upcoming biography of Skaaren:

This summer I spent five weeks at the Ransom Center with the support of a Mayer Filmscript fellowship. I worked in the Warren Skaaren collection in preparation for my new book, In Batman’s Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren.

In addition to writing original screenplays, the Austin-based Skaaren worked as a script doctor—rewriting screenplays by other writers—on many 1980s blockbusters, including Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and Batman (1989). By the time of his death in December 1990, he was one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood.

I approached the collection chronologically because I thought it was important to trace Skaaren’s development as a writer. In some cases he spent years nurturing projects like The Freddie Steinmark Story, a biopic about The University of Texas safety who lost a leg to cancer, only to see them never get made. But with each new project Skaaren perfected his writing process and style. He drafted finely detailed character sketches and elaborate “intensity” charts that measured a story’s dramatic highs and lows. Ultimately it was his ability to create multifaceted characters that caught Hollywood’s attention.

I spent most of my time reading multiple drafts of each screenplay. This can be an exciting but also painfully slow process, and the beauty of the Ransom Center fellowship is that it gave me the luxury of time in an environment conducive to such work. Because Skaaren was often hired as a script doctor and reworked screenplays initially created by others, the assignment of writing credit became a particularly delicate issue and influenced his future assignments, pay rate, and reputation. Every studio project that Skaaren worked on went to arbitration, and he kept voluminous notes and copies of all correspondence pertaining to each case. The arbitration of Beverly Hills Cop II, for instance, was especially heated because, as a sequel with a built-in audience, the film was expected to do very well, and literally millions of dollars were at stake for the writers. Indeed, the writer who worked on the screenplay prior to Skaaren (and who received a shared credit with Skaaren) sued the Writers Guild over its decision to split the writing credit. The case was still being appealed at the time of Skaaren’s death—three and a half years after the film’s initial release.

Thanks to the Ransom Center’s Steve Wilson and Katie Risseeuw, who oversaw the digitization of some of the collection’s sound recordings, I was able to hear Skaaren on tape interviewing retired British and Nepalese soldiers and even a witch doctor in preparation for his original screenplay Of East and West, a sweeping coming-of-age story set in England and Nepal. Not only did this provide the opportunity to “hear” Skaaren for the first time, but it also gave me a sense of the intense preparation that he cultivated throughout his writing career. These recordings offered a glimpse of the charm and confidence that so many of his friends and colleagues have mentioned when describing his personality and, ultimately, his success.

Watch this video as Macor further discusses her work in the Skaaren collection: